Is Darwin's theory of evolution right or wrong? It is a question that continues to divide some U.S. communities today. The battle to explain the very nature of our existence has raged since Darwin's groundbreaking research almost 150 years ago. Now, Naked Science puts Darwin's theory to the test by investigating his claims one by one.

Human Evolution - Discovering Ardipithecus:
Every Human being has one common question, where did we come from? Where do we come from, it's a profound human question. From the beginning we human beings seem so different from the animal world. Then came Darwin, he concluded that human beings like all living creatures evolved from natural selection. But he didn't have the human fossils to support his ideas. Now from a remote African desert, buried for more then four million years comes the fossil evidence that Darwin could have only imagined. "ARDIPITHECUS"

'Why Evolution Is True' by Jerry Coyne, AAI 2009:

'There is grandeur in this view of life' by Richard Dawkins, AAI 2009:

Where did we come from? What makes us human? An explosion of recent discoveries sheds light on these questions, and NOVA's comprehensive, three-part special, "Becoming Human," examines what the latest scientific research reveals about our hominid relatives.

Part 1, "First Steps," examines the factors that caused us to split from the other great apes. The program explores the fossil of "Selam," also known as "Lucy's Child." Paleoanthropolo..gist Zeray Alemseged spent five years carefully excavating the sandstone-..embedded fossil. NOVA's cameras are there to capture the unveiling of the face, spine, and shoulder blades of this 3.3 million-..year-old fossil child. And NOVA takes viewers "inside the skull" to show how our ancestors' brains had begun to change from those of the apes.Why did leaps in human evolution take place? "First Steps" explores a provocative "big idea" that sharp swings of climate were a key factor.

The other programs in the "Becoming Human" series are Part 2: "Birth of Humanity," which profiles the earliest species of humans, and Part 3: "Last Human Standing," which examines why, of various human species that once shared the planet, only our kind remains.

Humans and Chimpanzees have almost identical DNA. The main difference is that our second chromosome looks a lot like two separate ape chromosomes. Every chromosome has two vestigial telomeres. These are normally found only at the ends of a chromosome, but in chromosome 2 we see additional telomere sequences in the middle. This is evidence of an ancient telomere-telomere fusion that marks the point at which two ancestral ape chromosomes fused to give rise to human chromosome number two.